BSE low among food risks

Thursday

Apr 26, 2012 at 12:01 AMApr 26, 2012 at 12:30 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — If the mad cow found in California has you wondering about food safety, well, there are plenty of problems that pose serious risks to the food supply. But mad cow disease shouldn't be high on the worry list.

Just in the past few months, Americans have been sickened by contaminated sprouts, raw milk and sushi. Thirty people died last year from bacteria-tainted cantaloupe. And when it comes to hamburger, a dangerous strain of E. coli that can lurk in ground beef sickens thousands of people every year.

"What we know is that 3,000 Americans die every year from preventable food-borne illnesses that are not linked" to mad cow disease, said Sarah Klein of the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Things like E. coli, salmonella — that's where we should be focusing our attention, outrage and policy."

The comparable numbers for mad cow disease? Only four sick cows have ever been discovered in the United States, the one announced Tuesday being the first since 2006, and no human version of the illness has been linked to eating U.S. beef.

"From simply a public health issue, I put it very, very low," Cornell University food safety expert Martin Wiedmann said of the level of concern about mad cow disease.

Maintaining confidence in exports fuels the nation's monitoring of the beef supply as much as continuing safety concerns, he said.

Tuesday's news came from that monitoring: Routine testing of a dead dairy cow from central California showed the animal had bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, a disease that gradually eats holes in the animal's brain. U.S. health officials were adamant that there was no risk to the food supply — the cow never was destined for the meat market, and the World Health Organization says humans can't be infected by drinking milk from animals with BSE.

The United States has been guarding against BSE for years. A key part of the safety net: The animal tissues that can carry the BSE — including the brain and spinal cord — are removed from cattle before they're processed for food.

In addition, the U.S. surveillance program tests brain tissue taken from about 40,000 dead cows a year for BSE. That testing is designed to target the animals most at risk, said Richard Breitmeyer, who heads the University of California, Davis, laboratory that initially discovered the latest case.

High-risk animals include those with symptoms of neurological disease, "downer" animals at slaughterhouses, animals that die at dairies or cattle ranches for unknown reasons, and cows older than 30 months.

In other countries, BSE's spread through herds was blamed on making cattle feed using recycled meat and bone meal from infected cows, so the United States has long banned feed containing such material. That was key to Tuesday's announcement, too: USDA testing found the cow had a different form of the disease, so-called atypical BSE that means it didn't come from feed.

Instead, it was a sporadic disease — the cow developed it from a random mutation. Somehow, a protein the body normally harbors folds into an abnormal shape called a prion, setting off a chain reaction of misfolds that eventually kills brain cells.

Only 10 cases around the world have been found with atypical characteristics, said Lyndsay Cole of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

CSPI, the consumer group, points to other issues that advocates call more relevant for public health — such as stemming the food poisoning that the government estimates sickens 50 million people a year.